Read Starborne for Free Online

Ah,” she said. “ I see.” And laughed — giggled, really — as she almost always did when she used that particular verb, and they, not sure of the meaning of her laughter, laughed al ong with her anyway.
    Noelle had wanted to know, right at the end of her examination, how they had decided which sister would go and which would stay.
    We flipped a coin, they told her.
    She never found out whether that was really true.
    ***
    Noelle lies in une asy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. She sees it, she actually sees . The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the deck. The deck wears a slippery shiny coating of thin hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they hav e been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It conceals, coa g ulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice floes, colliding, grinding, churning: the flo es are at war, destroying one another ’ s edges, but some are ente r ing into treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it has begun to freeze. The vessel can barely make headway. Th e sails belly out us e lessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her ca b in, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind ’ s fist will punch through the stiff frozen canvas of the sails. Not h ing can save them. But now! Yes! Yes! A glow overhead! Yvon ne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the p e rfumed tropics, toward the lands of spices and pearls.
    ***
    “   ‘ Some say the world will end in fire, ’   ” Elizabeth offers. In the lounge, the talk among those who are not playing Go has turned to apocalyptic matters. “   ‘ Some say in ice. ’   ”
    “ Are you quoting something?” Huw wants to know.
    “ Of course she is,” says Heinz. “ You know that Elizabeth ’ s always quoting something.” Long-limbed straw-haired Elizabeth is the Wotan ’ s official bard and chronicler, among other things. Everyone on board has t o be Something-Among-Other-Things; multiple skills are the rule. But the center of Elizabeth ’ s being is poetry. “ I think it ’ s Shakespeare,” Heinz says.
    “ Not that old,” says Giovanna, looking up from her game. “ Only four or five hundred years, at most. An A merican.”
    “ Frost,” Elizabeth says. “ Robert Frost.”
    “ Is that a kind of ice?” someone asks.
    “ It ’ s a name,” says someone else.
    “   ‘ From what I ’ ve tasted of desire, ’   ” Elizabeth says, and her tone makes it clear that she is reciting again, “   ‘ I hold with those who favor fire. ’   ”
    The year-captain enters the room, just then, and Paco glances toward him and says in his booming unfettered way, “ And what about you, year-captain? How do you think the world ’ s going to end? We ’ ve done the sun going nova, we ’ ve done the entropic heat-death, we ’ ve done the rising of the seas until everything has drowned. We ’ ve done plague and drought and volcanoes. Give us your take, now.”
    “ Fimbulwinter,” the year-captain says. “ Ragnarok.” The barbaric half-forgotten words leap instantly t o his tongue